A Course In Freedom: The Drunken Monkey Speaks

By Lawrence Lanoff

Everything that we believe may be incorrect. Yet, our ego desperately seeks security in the safe and familiar. It wants to be right. When we are dominated by this drunken monkey in our head, our life is miserable. We become slave to the illusion that something "out there" is either threatening us, or is somehow magically going to save us. A Course In Freedom will help you to tame the drunken monkey living inside your head by teaching you how to see your life clearly, free from the powerful the stories and limiting beliefs that have held your life prisoner. The powerful tools in A Course In Freedom will help you to liberate yourself to a place of personal enlightenment. Personal enlightenment is the key to durable, lasting happiness, health and wellbeing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lawrence Lanoff
• Release date: Sep 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9780979405136

Lawrence Lanoff

Lawrence is a social-satirist-sex-pundit and best selling author who questions our cultural myths about life, sex and religion. He writes on female empowerment, science, myth and culture, and anything that crosses his mind. He is a professional photographer and veteran director/filmmaker, and the creator of the Tantra-X Formula.Discover more about his books, workshops, and one on one transformational experiences at lawrencelanoff.com

Book preview

Foreword by Jonathan Parker

Every once in awhile a book comes along that you don’t want to put down because it challenges your thinking and opens your mind. The book you are holding in your hands is just such a rare book. A Course in Freedom breaks fresh ground to expand your life view. As you digest page-after-page, you will realize worlds of beliefs are being overturned by exposing and challenging the very mythologies everyone has unwittingly lived by.

Lawrence Lanoff makes no pretense to soften the challenges he presents in each chapter. Facing tough realities from an early age he unearthed solutions to break himself free (as well as those he counsels) from the conformity all cultures impose, and now he shares a lifetime of deep insights into the inner workings going on behind the curtain of our creations.

If you thought you would or could continue through life thinking as you always have, then don’t read this book because it will confront you and change you. You may well find yourself pausing frequently and saying to yourself, How did I miss that insight all these years? In total, you will find yourself discovering dozens of new ways to think about all that you think.

Like me, you will probably find the content of the chapters that follow comprise more of an enlightenment handbook than most books addressing that subject. Chapter after chapter relentlessly reveals our hidden beliefs and secret questions and dismantles them one-by-one revealing the naked reality behind how we have all fabricated our lives from arbitrary choices and self-created illusions. Indeed, can anyone actually be enlightened when their lives are constructed of myriad unexamined assumptions and mythologies? No doubt, there have been few who have lived in those realms.

I have known Lawrence for nearly 30 years and have seen how tenaciously he has probed the inner workings of his life and the lives of the many he has worked with to unravel the causes for what works favorably and what doesn’t. In reading this book, you will have a new outlook on your life and the lives of the rest of humanity all caught in the same warp of mythological thinking. This is a book about positive futures for this is a book that brings great hope for all that we can be, and while not only showing us the direction, it provides the ways and means that will take us there. So, prepare to be challenged. Prepare to shift your awareness. Prepare to awaken!

Jonathan Parker

Introduction

The fact that you are reading this paragraph at this very moment in your life’s evolution suggests that you are probably on a path to freedom. A life lived in freedom is a life lived consciously— outside of the norm. After pursuing truth for more than 20 years, I realize that no place exists outside of us to look for truth. Everything that we need to understand about our deepest mysteries already exist within our own psyche.

I densely packed this book with mystical and practical life advice (that I intuited, meditated upon and refined in workshops and individual sessions for the past 25 years) to help you investigate and navigate your own life. I call this path the path of no path—a life course in freedom—no place to get to, but rather continual evolution and expansion of your mind. Either you are consciously on your path of freedom, or you are not; and on that path, you are either awake or you are asleep. You are either in clear light of your own truth, or the delusion of the illusion. Awake is awake. Asleep is asleep. Free is free. However, if you want to wake up and truly be free, then you are in the perfect place at the perfect time, with this manual in hand.

When you look at what is actually happening in life, it is mostly uneventful. Life simply is—we add our mythological meanings after the fact. I invite you to awaken from your mythological dreams that have been holding you prisoner. You have little to lose—except all that you are not – and everything to gain. The physical universe does not care about you, one way or another. Pain or joy, fear or pleasure, despair or ecstasy, your brain will attempt to provide you with evidence and validation about your beliefs in life. In this sense, you see and find what you look for.

Imagine for a moment that you could look around you without any myths about life. What you would see is that life boundlessly creates in infinite directions and variations—infinitely, without a moral compass. The universe is neutral and random if left alone. Act upon this neutral, random substance to create more of what you want and desire. The art of truly living is the structuring of random stuff of the universe and shaping it into the art piece of your life. In this sense, life is all here for you.

In order to live in accord with the infinitude of the natural expression of the universe, we are challenged to discover our unique, creative flow, and focus on what we really want to experience. Maturity consists of becoming one’s own authority in one’s own life: the fulfillment of fully experiencing our unique existence. It’s up to us to discover our own expression, throwing off the expectations of society, duty, obedience, obligation, and family.

Our brain is constantly filtering, projecting, expecting and structuring reality. Why not structure consciously more of what we desire? For the most part, we are completely free to be exactly the way we wish, within the generally accepted rules and laws of our culture. Why not create what makes you joyous and happy? Why not create more personal, sexual, and psychological freedom?

Webster’s dictionary defines freedom as the power to exercise choice and make decisions without constraint from within or without.

Freedom is your birthright and not dependent upon anything— not how much money you have or how moral you are. Freedom is independent of your life circumstances and constraints.

Life is typically lived from the if only perspective. If only I had X (fill in the blank), then I could finally be happy. How many if only statements about sex, money, spirituality, religion, job, family, love, relationships, etc., impact your perception of wonder, happiness, freedom and well being in this moment?

I invite you to take an inventory of your life. Pay attention to the places and spaces inside your body where you truly feel free, and where you feel constrained, blocked, or restricted.

The unconscious mind contains everything we can’t accept in life. Any sensations that we feel are too overwhelming, for whatever reason, end up in the unconscious mind. Since the unconscious, autonomic mind makes up 90 percent of brain function, then we better pay attention to what it is saying and doing with respect to our sense of self.

The conscious mind, on the other hand, contains everything we can accept. All sensations that we are willing to feel are contained in the conscious mind. The conscious mind represents what we allow ourselves to experience the sensations of—our comfort zone. Seeking the safety of our conscious mind, living within our comfort zone, dominates our whole life experience and perspective. Our life path then focuses on playing it safe.

The key to freedom in your life comes from understanding that any path you follow will eventually become the constraint. You will find that your beliefs are the obstacles to freedom. Let freedom guide you on your path. Society will not agree with you on your path of freedom—avoid looking outside yourself for approval. Do what feels good and right, and leads you to expansion and more freedom. Freedom happens when you discover your own path, your own joy and destroy your old, outworn beliefs and mythologies that keep you imprisoned. When mythologies are destroyed, freedom reigns, and energy flows back to the powerful, creative self. As energy flows back to your center, and you can use that free flowing energy to create and structure more of what you want.

Human beings are completely dissociated from the modalities of the past. New situations come up faster then we imagine. The world we live in changes rapidly. The models used 20,000 years ago or 2,000 years ago no longer work—nor perhaps do the models used 20 minutes ago. Things change. Technology is pushing us to the edge daily. We have to find our own way.

Ultimately, you must decide what is right for you and what is not. Take what you need from this book and let the rest go. Feel free to open it randomly, playfully and see how it answers your questions perfectly… sometimes harshly, and sometimes gently, guiding you on your own path.

You have to risk being alive to fully live your life.

Wishing you Infinite Love,

Lawrence Lanoff

Sedona, Arizona

April 2013

www.acourseinfreedom.com

1

The Power of Myth: How you are Kept Prisoner by a Drunken Monkey with Sharp Teeth and a Big Bite

The Drunken Monkey lives inside your head just beneath your conscious awareness whispering painful, paranoid, enraged, vengeful, confused, conflicted and often catastrophic guidance through an unconscious flow of myths, symbols, images, voices, feelings, and thoughts, flowing day and night through your body and mind—a suicidal back seat driver, clamoring for control of the steering wheel of your life. When the drunken monkey speaks, no matter how insane the thought, your brain has no choice but to listen. Up until now, you have been the drunken monkey’s prisoner, and you are living on a planet of prisoners whose minds are plagued and paralyzed by the drunken monkey’s distorted, terrorized thinking.

The operating system of the drunken monkey is based on myths. Myths structure the deep, unconscious brain, and thereby inadvertently structure the conscious, self-aware mind, and what we call our conscience. We are rendered helpless by these deep and powerful myths, the cute little fairy stories with teeth, that the drunken monkey seamlessly weaves into an unconscious nightmare of fear, anxiety, shame, blame, and guilt that makes life for billions of people nearly unbearable.

What we call the conscious mind, the new brain, is a relatively recent development in human evolution. As the prefrontal cortex and cortex evolved, they gave us the ability to build large social structures for mutual benefit, safety, and support. With our self-aware mind, we recognize and bond with people in our immediate group. We know when we hurt another’s feelings or break moral codes—seeing the consequences of our actions through the eyes of others; we feel their emotional pain. We can also scan the world around us for potential threats to the group’s well being. By having a self-aware mind and conscience, we can contemplate our own life, lessons, and destiny of death.

The new brain focuses on relationships, imagination, thinking, problem solving, possibility, potential, resource sharing, etc. The conscious mind interacts with stored memories and feelings, allowing us to learn, grow, adjust, adapt, and change our behaviors so that we fit in and thrive within our society. We have a biological drive to be part of a whole. However, an unintended consequence of the conscious mind is that it is weak when compared to the ancient brain. The old brain has highly developed neural pathways fighting for access to the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems. The old brain dominates the new brain; the drunken monkey runs the show. The new brain is helpless to defend itself against the constant onslaught of the ancient symbolic language running rampant behind the scenes.

The language of the drunken monkey is myth and symbols, and our modern mind has been drugged, trapped, and programmed by myths and symbols thousands of years old that developed around the same time as the newer parts of the brain were firmly coming on-line. We have become slaves to our brains, and more accurately, the operating system developed by the drunken monkey to help us survive and not be annihilated by life.

Myths are the unconscious operating system. Myths are the shorthand symbols of fear, anxiety, and guilt that the ancient brain uses to control the body and mind. Myths are powerful, energy evoking symbols and stories about our ancestors’ severe misunderstandings and misperceptions about life, told to other ancestors as if these stories were correct or worse yet, truth. Myths are a virus with no cure—unknowingly spreading lineage to lineage, family to family, city to city, state to state, country to country—continuously evolving over time to fit the language and imagery of the day. Myths keep people in an unhappy, ignorant, sleep state, thinking that they know the truth about this life. People fight, work, live and die for myths that they believe in—myths that they inherited and now take for granted as truth.

Myths swim just beneath the surface of conscious awareness and are nearly impossible to catch. Even when we do see our myths, it is only for fleeting moments. They seamlessly slip in and out of our inner minds, constantly influencing our moment-to-moment experience whether we are awake or asleep. We don’t consciously perceive the myth’s symbols working on our psyche; therefore, releasing ourselves from the myth’s clutches is nearly impossible.

From the womb until our final gasp for breath, myths are cleverly implanted into the unconscious via cute little stories that mommy and daddy tell us about life. These stories comfort us, giving us the rules and laws that we need to survive and thrive in our culture. Myths compose the operating system of this human life and determine almost every decision that we make. We attribute the creation of this operating system, and the feelings within our conscience to God, but we have no idea that these feelings are actually composed of the energies from powerful myths, created by our ancestors, and passed down through the ages as absolute truth.

Let me give you an example. Suppose you know this truth about life: sex is dirty, bad, and shameful. Perhaps you feel guilty about self-pleasuring or engaging sexually with a partner. You’ve heard that it’s immoral to orgasm—that God’s purpose for sex is procreation only. Moreover, your own parents told you that God would punish you if you feel too good. You know this is the truth because any time you have sex or self-pleasure, you feel God judging you, or nonphysical beings such as angels or dead relatives watching you with displeasure. Therefore, you experience horrible feelings of guilt and shame flowing through your body anytime that you even think something sexual. From the drunken monkey’s perspective, the feelings of guilt and shame prove to you that sex is bad, evil, and wrong.

The drunken monkey tells you that something external (God) is punishing you for having animal, lower chakra desires. You are taught that it’s not good to feel good. After all, you feel God and your conscience pressuring your psyche about how evil your sexual impulses and behaviors are. The problem is that you don’t know that your conscience is set by your inherited and learned core beliefs and mythologies about life. God does not set your conscience—your ancestors do.

You must remember to ask the simple question, Is this myth, this cute little story that mommy and daddy told me about life, actually serving me? For that matter, is it even correct? Mommy and daddy can’t question because they have been commanded not to question by God’s law.

Our religions, the spiritually oriented infrastructure of myths that we live by, appeared roughly 7,000 years ago. The key insight that priests propagated was a simple one: as above, so below. The science and mythology of that time taught that the Gods were in heaven, and that they moved the stars, sun, and moon in an orderly manner. The sun rose at a certain time and set at a certain time. The heavens, the ephemeral domain of angels and God, were predictable, orderly, and perfect, while the earthly plane was evil, irregular, and abhorrent. Earth had loss, famine, pain, suffering, sex, murder, death, war, and defeat.

The idea, the myth, the gross misunderstanding that followed was this: we should order earth to be like heaven—as above, so below. That is our job, and that is what God expects: as above (order, clarity, and predictability), so below. With this simple misperception, this simple misunderstanding of ancestral insight taken as truth, the entire modern world has been condemned to a psychological sentence of life in prison. The drunken monkey is running the show. From education to law, and everything in between, our modern society has been ordered around this gross misunderstanding, and the drunken monkey loves it.

Imagine using a 7,000 year-old road map to drive across the United States. The map would be mostly useless. Yet, we continue using maps of life and morality generated by our ancestors whose science and ideas are thousands of years old. How crazy is that?

Our entire modern world is structured around this ancient idea—as above, so below—which is incorrect. The heavens are not ordered by God, but rather by laws of gravity. Gravity is a physical force, not a spiritual one, and there is no up there anyway. Space is space. We live in an infinitely expanding universe that is expanding infinitely. Nothing is fixed in space, and there is no static point of heaven or anywhere else up there in the universe. There is emptiness and expansion. Our rules, laws, and morals are based on a misunderstanding of a spiritual story; yet the power of myth is that despite all human science and insight that have appeared in the last 7,000 years, the erroneous story persists, structuring and organizing our lives from the inside out. As a planet, we are lost in the delusion that there is truth out there, in the heavens above; lost in a vast illusion of the way we were taught to think about life.

The power of myth came to me through meditations, insights, client sessions, and personal experiences. I asked myself the simple questions, Why is it that some things change and other things don’t? What within holds on tightly to certain beliefs? Who is really running the show in my life?

Surprisingly, the answer I stumbled upon radically changed my life forever. I recognized it was not God running the show, but rather, my brain. God, it seemed, had little if any influence over the brain. I discovered that the deepest parts of my brain, brain stem, and limbic system were aware and communicative, but beyond my conscious perception. These parts of the brain behaved like a drunken monkey wrestling for control of my daily perception and experience, often winning out over my conscious thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This is a huge insight because the ancient brain does not use verbal language, but rather uses symbols that are not recognized by conscious awareness.

There exists, in the brain, a language system of symbolic imagery that flows beneath the surface, communicating extensively and effectively, yet remaining unconscious and beyond detection by the new brain. The rudimentary symbols in the ancient brain cause the release of vast amounts of energy in the body in the form of stress, tension, shame, guilt, fear, anxiety, and worry.

For two weeks, I entered the world of this ancient, fear-ridden, and symbolic communication, and my life, as I knew it, fell apart. My awareness awakened: what appeared to be coming from out there, I discovered, was actually sorting, filtering, and assembling within my brain, but creating the impression that it was coming from outside of myself. Reality, I discovered, was not out there, but rather, being assembled by a drunken monkey inside my head.

I suddenly saw everything in life as a symbol of something else—a secret code of the ancient reptile brain. I began discerning and understanding this simplistic yet powerful language with my conscious new brain. I was shocked by the discovery that, though I thought I was in control of my life, there was an alternate life running a majority of my experience, and it didn’t want to change. That part wanted chaos, pain, suffering, guilt, and shame. That’s all it knew. After two weeks of communication with these parts of my brain, fear disappeared from my life, replaced by creativity, peace, joy, and ease.

For nearly two years, I was in free fall, unable to communicate to others the depths of what I was learning. I saw the symbolic nature of everything, and how people react to the drunken monkey symbols flowing unconsciously through the brain, communicating them with fervor to others in their daily lives. I no longer saw life as reality—I saw life as a collection of symbols, flimsily woven together inside of the brain, giving rise to the feeling of being conscious, and based in reality. (We know what we know because it feels real.) Furthermore, I noticed that other people were completely wrapped up in their inner unconscious symbols, seeing them as truth! I saw the way people’s faces contorted when the drunken monkey ran the show. People argued and fought with dumbfounding rage, struggling with self-created symbols emerging from deep within consciousness—yet perceiving the symbols as truths emanating from the world outside.

The magnitude of influence that the drunken monkey has over our lives magnified and clarified for me while watching an image of the President on CNN. I watched the President’s face contort as he unknowingly referenced the internal symbols being generated by the drunken monkey in his head, and vividly communicated those symbols to the American public. He awakened